It is 1994 and I am 20 years old. Chicago noise-rock icons
the Jesus Lizard have begun a four-month tour in support of their
latest Touch and Go Records full-length, Down. Next year, they
will sign to Capitol Records, which will lessen their impact and lead
to their 1999 breakup. But tonight, they will bludgeon us.
Diminutive ex-Texan David Yow mumbles about the “coeds” in
attendance. In a flash, he hurls two cans of Budweiser at no one,
anyone—hard. His bandmates—independent of the
madman—launch their own bruising, metallic projectiles: “Destroy
Before Reading,” “Puss,” and “Boilermaker.” Everyone flinches when Yow
picks up his mic stand and fakes a swing.
The sound is a rock blender on frappe—a whirling blade through
the meat of Led Zeppelin, negative hardcore, pilfered blues, and music
theory. Yow is swimming on the crowd. He is a poet strangled, true to
his gurgling studio tracks, some of which were recorded in a trashcan.
Guitarist Duane Denison turns the band’s jazz-like spatial
tone—itself a perversion in alt-rock—into a wall of
shrieking treble, detonated with cruel chord changes, rather than the
era’s easy Mosh Here grunge-pedal stomp. Bolstered by menacing bassist
David Sims and the hunched-over, last-of-the-Bonhams Mac McNeilly, the
Jesus Lizard are incredible. For the first and probably last time in my
life, I am sweating through my jeans.
I interviewed Yow in 2007. He was returning to music full time after
seven years of photo retouching: movie billboards, DVD covers, vodka
advertisements. “My work seems to have turned its back on me,” he
explained, “so I’ve forsaken it.” He was the new member of proggy Los
Angeles noise-rock band Qui, sharing vocal duties on an ambitious
record. “After the Jesus Lizard broke up, I had no desire whatsoever to
be in a band again,” he said. “I wasn’t looking for it. I wasn’t
seeking it out. I really felt like I was too limited as a vocalist to
be in a band again, and if I was, I would feel like I would just be
repeating myself.” Instead, with Qui, Yow learned to sing.
I also interviewed Denison. The classically trained guitarist had
jumped from one group to another since the breakup—Hank III to
Tomahawk to U.S.S.A.—while also doing studio work for the likes
of Will Oldham and Beverley Knight. To insure his child he took a job
at Gibson Guitar in Nashville. Music was still his life. Why not
reunite the Jesus Lizard? “If you get caught in that world, it’s hard
to get out,” he said. “I really don’t want to ever be one of these guys
who just keeps playing their old songs forever.”
The original lineup had received at least two offers to play before
this year’s reunion tour. But minor squabbling—not aversion to
playing together—delayed the inevitable. “Touch and Go first
called me and said, ‘Hey, we’re going to do this anniversary thing. Do
you think the Jesus Lizard would play?'” Yow said, referring to the
label’s 25th anniversary festival in 2006. That year, Yow and Sims
would instead reunite Scratch Acid, their pre-Jesus Lizard Texas
outfit. “To be honest, I was sort of miffed about that,” Denison said.
When the members were asked to play All Tomorrow’s Parties in England
in 2007, Denison declined. “We won’t play in front of our real friends
and our fans here in Chicago, but we’ll go across the ocean and go play
for a bunch of art losers, so some snotty English magazines can write
about us? No, I don’t think I will.”
Today, Yow worries less about repeating himself, and more about
income after the Jesus Lizard reunion ends late next month in
Chicago.
“I gotta figure out some way to make a living,” he says, running
errands near his home in Los Angeles. Before they disband again, what
was it that made the reunion finally work?
“I didn’t really feel like it was my place to veto it if
three-fourths of the guys wanted to do it. And [it’s] in conjunction
with the reissues of the Touch and Go stuff,” he says, pausing
emphatically. “And the money is really good.”
But no more studio albums, he adds. “I don’t want to drag it out. I
think that the novelty of the situation would wear off, and I think
that we would probably be playing smaller places and probably be
embarrassed and maybe humiliated. And I don’t want that to happen.”
Seeing them live will be good enough, suggests a live review I wrote
of that show in ’94: “I can honestly tell you that this was my favorite
concert of all time.”